It is quite literally the only news I'm aware of which is (1) fairly big and professional, competent (2) not automatically pro-Western on everything (3) not run by some government, and filled with stories about how that government's great and any bad stories about it are evil lies
While not run by the government, the Al Jazeera Media Network is partially funded by the government of Qatar. I don’t think this is a negative, but something people should be aware of.
Yeah fair enough. If you want to know shady things about Jared Kushner (edit: or good things about Israel), they're probably not gonna say a god damned word.
For those looking to better understand the biases of any given media outlet, this is a good place to drop a recommendation for Citations Needed podcast with Adam Johnson and Nima Shiraz.
It's a great media analysis and criticism show. Who watches the watchers? These fuckin guys!
Even aside from potential or actual bias, there's a pretty wide gap between bias and the incitement that the Israeli government is accusing Al Jazeera of. I don't have to fully endorse the entirety of Al Jazeera's coverage to think that shutting them down and criminalizing them is a pretty huge overreach.
They are the remnants of BBC Middle East, hence que quality. They are, however, funded by the government of Qatar, and you won’t see that country being cast in unfavorable light in their articles. But other than that, they’re great.
A really good article about it. TLDR: BBC decided to close it. But do read the article, it shows why Qatar decided to fund it, and it's really interesting.
Innuendo Studios calls this The Ship of Theseus -- taking individual half-truths and stringing them together into a long line to construct an aggregate statement that bears no resemblance to the truth.
Al Jazeera is the Qatari government.
* partly owned by the Qatari government
The stateargely responsible for the funding of Hamas
Not seeing the connection. "Some of Hamas's horrible and corrupt leaders live in Qatar, therefore a news outlet funded partly by the government of Qatar is obviously compromised." I mean, Jared Kushner lives in Florida. Does that mean something about the Miami Herald (or would it, if DeSantis was partially funding it)?
I don't think it's a secret that Al Jazeera has a generally pro-Arab and anti-Israeli viewpoint. I said they were fuckin fantastic and listed some reasons; I didn't say they were totally free from bias / free from having a viewpoint. But even their stories directly on the Gaza war (the most slanted selection of stuff you'll be able to find) are actually pretty factual to me. An example is this story about the Hamas rape claims. It's a little slanted. I don't agree with "while isolated rapes may have taken place, there was insufficient evidence to support allegations that rape had been 'widespread and systematic'." But, it acknowledges sexual violence and human rights violations by Hamas. That puts it absolutely well and clear above the quality of a lot of Israeli media from the mirror-image side, and actually more anti-Hamas than even a lot of the Western press on the same story, which for some reason made the whole focus of the story into the New York Times reporting "false stories," without also making it clear that yes, there was definitely sexual violence, that part is undeniably true even if some specific stories were false.
Do you know of any really severely slanted / dishonest coverage by Al Jazeera? Stories where Israel are involved, and not bothering to report anything about Jared Kushner, are the only examples I'm really aware of. Other than that kind of thing I think of it as generally excellent quality.
That isn't what the ship of Theseus is, and I would also point out that staking money from the funder and shelterers of a terrorist organization, even if just 30%, creates a conflict of interest that can't be ignored or brushed aside.
We are living in mirror world when leftists are getting their news from right wing theocracies.
Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, India, Iraq: The controversy is that some government attacked Al Jazeera for its reporting and/or took away their press credentials or ability to operate. It's noted that it's banned from operating in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan and the UAE.
Australia, Bangladesh: Can't completely make head or tail of what happened but it sounds like government people getting mad at Al Jazeera for their reporting, not some disinterested party saying that some reporting Al Jazeera was doing wasn't true
Israel: I found, for the first time, some pretty credible allegations of them doing something wrong, including among other things one story from February 2015 that actually seemed like something they reported wasn't true.
At that point I stopped reading the list. But I had to go 8 countries down before I found something where it actually sounded to me like they definitely did something wrong, and 9 years back before I found one story they reported that was actually completely untrue (as opposed to just a bias you have to keep in mind when reading).
Question. If an Israeli or American paper:
Celebrated the release of someone who had killed a bunch of Arabs
Published a story about Arab atrocities that turned out not to be true
Published only one side of the story about an armed conflict, where really both sides needed to be presented
Would that mean it's a joke and anyone who reads it is ignorant? 'Cause they do that shit all the time. I don't think so; I think they can still be a good paper, you just have to keep in mind the bias that they have.
Well I notice Fox is a common denominator in both stories, and I do believe people who get their news from that source are generally guillable at best and uneducated at worst.
But I also think all sides are equally capable of getting things wrong, which is why we need independent journalists (such as those aligned with Bellingcat, for instance) to have reporters on the ground.
It's not Fox; it's MSNBC, the Wall Street Journal, Fox, NPR, Reuters, the New York Times, and Joe Biden.
"All sides are equally capable of getting things wrong" was exactly my point here. Your second paragraph, I very much agree with. Does that mean that your whole assertion that Al Jazeera was dangerous evil terrorist garbage is retracted now? I would say that they are roughly speaking a mirror image for the New York Times or similar "Israel is fine, please look away from this dead baby at this story about Hamas instead" minded paper. Or is the New York Times also dangerous and evil? Or does it work in only one direction, or how?
I mean, if your mindset is that Israel is the good guys and Hamas are the bad guys, and so a bias against Israel is an offensive thing and you don't want to stomach it in your news organizations, then fair enough. You can say that if you want. But I think some people will try to present that as the "objective" viewpoint and the mirror image viewpoint as the "terrorist" viewpoint. That's not really a requirement I have for my news (in either direction) -- like just tell me what happened, filter it through whatever lens is how you think it is, and let me sort out from a few multiple sources and make sense of how I think the overall picture is. As long as someone's not outright lying, it doesn't bother me. And I feel like if Al Jazeera were making up facts on any kind of regular basis I'd have heard of it, and the fact that so many authoritarian governments want to ban them kind of makes me like them.
Besides NPR (which itself does not do international on the ground reporting) which of your sources are state funded? Specifically which of them are funded by a right wing theocracy?
None. That is the difference. Fox News might overtly hate gay people, but are they funded by people who have courts which prosecute homosexuality?
We should prevent that sort of stuff at home and disavow it abroad. Especially if we are leftists, no?
Does that mean that your whole assertion that Al Jazeera was dangerous evil terrorist garbage is retracted now? I would say that they are roughly speaking a mirror image for the New York Times or similar "Israel is fine, please look away from this dead baby at this story about Hamas instead" minded paper. Or is the New York Times also dangerous and evil? Or does it work in only one direction, or how?
Someone could say that the New York Times is funded by a mindless money-driven machine which seeks only profit, and all its coverage needs to be defined in that light, and so we can safely discard anything it has to say. I wouldn't say that. But it does make arguably an equal amount of sense to discarding Al Jazeera because they're funded in part by a theocratic monarchy. I would say we should judge them primarily on their output and journalistic standards.
Let me just tell you, you'd have been on the wrong side of history during the Troubles.
Now that aside, if you think there's only one terrorist organization involved in the current war you need to rethink, well, everything about the conflict, because everything Hamas does Israel does times 10 to 100.
I don't agree with "while isolated rapes may have taken place, there was insufficient evidence to support allegations that rape had been 'widespread and systematic'."
I mean it turned that that there was no widespread and systematic rape no?
I read part of the UN report; I would describe what they reported as "widespread." Especially since they lay out a lot of the factors that would prevent them finding out about any given instance where it happened and they still found a bunch of instances.
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Israel has ordered the closure of Al Jazeera in the country, a move the Qatar-based news network called a “criminal act.”
Video obtained by CNN showed Israeli police accompanied by agents of the Israel Security Agency entering Al Jazeera’s broadcasting position in Jerusalem on Sunday.
Al Jazeera condemned the Israeli cabinet’s decision as a “criminal act,” which it said infringes on the human right to access information.
It continued: “Israel’s suppression of the free press to cover up its crimes by killing and arresting journalists did not deter us from performing our duty.
The move comes a month after Netanyahu vowed to shut down the television channel in the country following the passage of a sweeping law allowing the government to ban foreign networks perceived as posing a threat to national security.
In response, Al Jazeera – which has been producing on the ground reporting of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza – slammed the decision and vowed to continue its “bold and professional coverage.”
